When Yale faculty member Evren Savcı was writing her dissertation on queer politics in her birth country of Turkey a decade ago, she found there was little published on the subject. So she decided to expand her research into a book.
In “Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam” (Duke University Press), Savcı, an assistant professor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, illuminates the struggles of queer individuals living under Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (known as AKP), a moderate-Islamist political regime which rose to power in 2002. It’s based in part on her ethnographic research on queer activists from 2008 through the 2013 Gezi Park uprising, when thousands of Turkish citizens — among them LGBT rights activists — gathered to protest government plans to convert one of Istanbul’s last city parks into a shopping mall and were met with police violence.
The book also explores the ways Western LGBT political terminology has traveled to and been interpreted in the Muslim-majority nation and offers new ways to think about queer political movements beyond binary interpretations, such as traditional-versus-modern, global-versus-local, or East-versus-West. Among other topics, Savcı investigates the murder of a Kurdish gay man whose father is accused of committing the crime to protect his family’s honor, and portrays the lives of trans sex workers who are increasingly harassed by police in public spaces.
Savcı, a scholar of transnational sexualities who is also affiliated with the Yale MacMillan Center’s Council on Middle East Studies, recently spoke with YaleNews about the book and the fight for LGBT rights in Turkey. The interview is edited and condensed.
When you started your research in Turkey back in 2008, many democratic transformations were taking place. What changed?
Evren Savcı: At the time, the AKP was engaged in democratic openings as part of Turkey’s European Union accession bid. These included the banning of capital punishment, which was a pre-condition of the accession process, changes in misogynistic language in laws, the removal of references to morality and honor from the law, and the introduction of marital rape as a crime. The first state-run Kurdish television station was created and the government was talking about starting diplomatic relationships with Armenia, a country with which there are historic tensions. There was talk about a headscarf opening; headscarves had previously been outlawed in public offices and universities. These changes were mostly welcomed.
But by 2010, as I was getting ready to finish my dissertation, the tone of the country was changing. There were hunger strikes in Kurdish prisons that the government was denouncing. This was at the time of the Arab Spring. The world was talking about Turkey as a model for the Arab world, but it was clear that the government was beginning to repress dissent.
Increasingly there were more demands for submission to the government. Labor unions, feminists, and queer subjects were all critical of the government, and it looked like all the changes were just a very calculated part of the accession process. When that didn’t deliver [accession negotiations have been stalled since 2016], the government didn’t have as much investment in these democratic openings.
Evren Savcı
By the time of the Gezi Park protest, journalists were being jailed and many forms of dissent were punished. Were queer people increasingly marginalized?
Savcı: By this time, it started becoming clear that the country was being turned into a privatizing construction machine. A lot of public goods started being privatized and many of these privatization projects were going to direct relatives of people in charge or to close allies. Many of the urban development projects were not only harmful to the social fabric but caused environmental damage. The protestors were contesting the privatization and construction.
The uprising was a big challenge to AKP rule. This was a countrywide protest, and the police used plastic bullets, water cannons, and tear gas on the protestors. Severe police violence became the norm.
U.S. scholars of neoliberalism have written about how this economic system concentrates inequality in the lowest echelons of society. I argue that in Turkey, there has been a deployment of marginality to larger and larger masses of people. Anyone not aligned with the government is seen as a “terrorist” or enemy of the nation.
After the military coup attempt in 2016, President Erdoğan signed many decrees into law. Feminists and queer people were openly targeted by the government as “immoral” subjects. I argue in my book that queer politics is a good place to think about the mechanism of neoliberalism even without Islam because a neoliberal state is itself is a morality regime. There is a belief in individual responsibility and self-entrepreneurism; everyone is expected to ideally create their own job. There is a disappearance of social safety nets like healthcare, social security, and pensions. Any failure is understood as deeply individual, and dissent is viewed by the government as an attack on the national economy, where the economy itself is seen as an object of national security.
In Turkey, marginality was already experienced by Kurdish people, feminists, and queers. But increasingly, a lot more people were on the “wrong” side of Turkish morality: students in co-ed housing, whether straight or queer, students who were holding hands, women who were laughing in public, women who refuse motherhood — all were viewed by the government as immoral subjects.
You make a connection in your book between those who were advocating for the freedom to wear headscarves in universities and LGBT activists. What is the connection?
Savcı: As the AKP was doing these democratic openings, there was interest in lifting the headscarf ban. Secularists wondered if this meant an Islamization of the country. There were some who said that if the ban was lifted at universities it would mean headscarves would next be allowed at middle and elementary schools. One government minister responded to this debate by saying, “Look, we don’t have to give people everything they want. Homosexual people are asking for the right to get married, are we going to give it to them?”
Gay marriage was not even a debate at the time he said that, but this statement ended up introducing LGBT rights into the national imagination as a potential challenge for the government and pious Muslims. It became a kind of litmus test in the headscarf debate, where headscarf activists were being asked if they also supported LGBT rights. It was a test of their sincerity [about democratic reforms].
There are lots of secular Turkish citizens who do not support LGBT rights, and their access to public education is not curtailed as it is for women who wear headscarves. I wanted to look at the complexity of the discussions that were being had. There was ultimately a falling out between headscarf and LGBT activists, but I believe that there could have been more productive conversations between them if LGBT rights had not been used as a discursive device in the debate.
Do you have any hope that the freedoms queer activists hope to achieve can be realized under the current regime?
Savcı: Not under the current regime, no. But I do have hope. I think that the Turkish people have learned important lessons under painful circumstances, in part because of that arc of democratic openings that then came crashing down.
So many people have been targeted with violating morality standards, and I think it is a good thing that so many more of us — not just Kurdish people or LGBT people or feminists or others who express dissent — are more and more marginalized. This regime will be over some day. I hope that people remember then that marginalization doesn’t have boundaries. It doesn’t stop with this group or that group. If we have a system where some people are pushed out of acceptable existence, anyone can be pushed out.
There have been productive openings for not thinking about Islam in a monolithic way, not thinking about gender and sexual non-normativity in a monolithic way. That genie is out of the bottle. The question is how to create a social, peaceful coexistence in which people know how to talk to each other and don’t see an enemy when they look at a fellow citizen.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
